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Minutes
of Meetings with God |
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Trying to be Honest ... |
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Most of what has been said and written since the terrible events of September 11, 2001 hasn't spoken to my condition very much. I've found that the vast majority of what has come from purported leaders adds to the confusion and fear, and either is out of touch with reality or isn't really very honest. At it's worst, the cacophony has been rife with fabrications, manipulations, as well as desperate and despicable politics. In these times of fear, confusion, and dishonesty, I know I need to hold fast to self-transcending love, courage, and, especially, honesty. Honesty seems extremely rare these days. I hope what follows is mostly honest. A friend recently gave me a book written by a United Methodist Bishop. The Bishop was trying to explain his reactions to what has happened nationally and globally since that horrible day of terrorism. The Bishop called himself a "situational pacifist." It may have sounded good to him; he may have thought that it would keep "what he believes" from alienating his church constituents. However, being a "situational pacifist" seems rather like trying to be a "part-time virgin." One either is a pacifist or one is not. It is a failure in honesty to call ourselves pacifists unless we are willing to carry that cross all the way to our own crucifixion. We need a heart wrenching honesty that most people who are for peace don't want to pursue. The first time I was exposed to such honesty was in seminary. It was a Quaker seminary. In a classroom, more than a dozen of us were discussing peace and the demands of peace-making on each of us. The discussion tended to be very idealistic; it embraced the notion of respect for all life and never killing anyone for any reason. Finally, after almost an hour, one of my classmates, who had been very quiet, spoke up. He was from Kenya. He was a life-long Quaker. He was a man of peace. But he described a day when he and several of his friends (all Quakers) were returning from the sugarcane fields. On a knoll overlooking their village, they unexpectedly came upon a small group of mercenaries who were setting up a machine gun in order to attack the village in which the friends lived, a small village of about 400 that consisted mostly of women, children and old men. The mercenaries were paid killers. The recent past had shown that no discussion or pleading would deter them from the attack they were about to make. The small band of Friends, Quakers, faced a hard decision. Their religious convictions called them to shun violence, and to be at peace with all people under every circumstance. The mercenaries did not know of their presence. The decision was to either avoid doing a violent act and sneak away into the bush, allowing the killers do their evil deed, letting them kill some 400 of their family members and neighbors. Or, to use the advantage that surprise gave them and to kill the mercenaries with their cane-cutting knives. My classmate tearfully confessed, on that day, he slit a mercenary's throat. He confessed that he lived with a strong sense of guilt for what he had done. He felt that he had, in a sense, walked with the devil, in that deed that stained his hands with blood. He knew our Lord has forgiven him for what he had done. The problem was, he still had trouble forgiving himself. Yet he also knew that he would have felt even more guilt had he and his friends just disappeared into the bush. He would have had the blood of his family and neighbors on his hands because he had failed to do what would have spared them. Needless to say, the idealistic discussion about peace came to a halt. We left the class after a time of prayer, for our classmate and for ourselves. My own call to honesty came some years later, on a country road in Tennessee. I was riding "the midnight shift" with a cousin of mine who was a policeman. The other details are unimportant. It is enough to say that I was the distance of a trigger pull from shooting, and possibly killing, someone who was threatening someone I love. Thank God, I did not squeeze the trigger. On one hand, that incident made me realize what it is like to walk with the devil. On the other hand, it made me realize that to stand idly by in the name of non-violence or pacifism is to be complicit with those who would do evil.Ten minutes on a country road, also convinced me I am not a pacifist. It is not a cross I can carry the whole way. Yet, I feel strongly the truth in Apostle Paul's injunction:
It's important to be honest on both sides of the peace and war question. Let us not try to deceive ourselves, violence and, especially, killing, under any circumstance is being overcome by evil. It is the failure of good to overcome evil. It plants the seeds that will grow into future violence and killing. War, particularly, is the total failure of good to overcome evil. Those who have been at war know that it is walking with the devil. Ralph Waldo Emerson went so far as to say, "To wish for war is atheism." It is more than breaking the Sixth Commandment, it is a total failure of our trust in God. When the politicians fail at peace and justice, it is those in the military (along with the men, women and children in the war zone) who pay the price of the failure. No one can walk with the devil for any length of time and come away unscathed. There is always a huge price to be paid. Although a person may survive war physically undamaged, there is always wounding of the emotions and the spirit. That is equally true of nations and individuals. At it's very best, war is only the lesser of many evils. That is true no matter how great an evil a war might ultimately thwart. During and after any war, nations and individuals are in need of forgiveness and healing. Denying that need in any way, or rationalizing any war by calling it "just" or "holy" simply makes the need for forgiveness and healing all the greater. Now more than ever we are all in need of forgiveness. Now, more than ever, we need to realize that it is not enough to be pacifists, in the sense of being against war. Being against war is merely reactionary. Now, more than ever, we need to be the peacemakers that Jesus called his followers to be. Peacemaking is about radical, fundamental change of everything and everyone, of who we are and of how we live with each other. It is about self-transcending love, about courage, and about honesty. When those are put into action, there is justice and peace. Peacemaking is about letting God reign and letting the Kingdom arrive. Anything else is too little and will likely be too late. Two and a half millennia ago, a poet, struggling to make sense of troubling times, penned words that have been a great help to me during our deeply troubling times. Through the ages, the words remind me that I am not alone in how I feel about things. A Psalmist wrote:
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